Well said. I don't blame people entirely for depending on cognitive shortcuts because we are oppressed and sapped of mental energy but fighting oppression effectively necissitates we recognize what it looks like and where it comes from.

Something I’ve noticed as well is that this latest generation of young people seem to be extremely sex-negative and increasingly puritan to the point of intensely policing others if they detect a shred of sexuality…

This is a largely western phenomenon from what I've seen and it's led to clashes on RedNote and other places, thus the policing takes on a racist form. Big surprise. I think there's plenty of sex positive young people in the west, they just get silences and suppressed by the negative people you mentioned, many of whom go to absolutely extreme measures to antagonize them. Doxxing, threats of abuse, the list goes on and on. One example was doxxing someone in the middle east to homophobic parents. This, I believe, is a reproduction of capitalist power-dynamics as well as fear of ostracization out of "looking bad". Fear justified and self-reproduced in part by the aforementioned abuses. Thankfully pushback's been stronger lately.